Molly's Millions

by Victoria Connelly

  Why couldn’t Marty have had a sweet old grandfather? Carolyn wondered. She’d never known her own grandparents, and had been so excited at the prospect of having a grandfather figure but had been bitterly disappointed when Old Bailey had turned out to be the perfect incarnation of Ebenezer Scrooge. The contents of his cupboards and fridge wouldn’t have filled a doll’s house, his clothes weren’t even fit for the charity bag and during the winter months she always had to plead for the heating to be turned up to a level above tepid.

  ‘You’re not cold, are you?’ he’d bark from his winged throne.

  ‘Yes, I bloody well am!’ Carolyn wanted to bark back but, as with Marty, she’d smile sweetly and say nothing.

  One of her greatest fears was that Marty would turn into his grandfather. Magnus had managed it so it seemed inevitable that Marty should follow suit and become a real Bailey. Carolyn pouted. He was well on his way, she had to admit.

  ‘Caro?’

  She turned round and saw Marty standing in the doorway.

  ‘You made me jump,’ she said, hoping to high heaven that he hadn’t been stood there reading her mind.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ He walked towards her and looked down at the photograph she still had in her hand.

  ‘Oh – you know – just looking through the family photos.’

  He shook his head. ‘You’ve seen them all a hundred times before.’

  ‘I know. But I get the feeling I’m the only one who looks at them.’

  He placed his hands on her shoulders. ‘Come on. How about a cup of tea?’

  She knew what he meant: it was time for her to make tea for everyone. ‘OK,’ she said, giving him the benefit of a smile. ‘At home.’

  Marty’s dark eyebrows drew together. ‘What?’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Don’t you feel well?’

  ‘I feel absolutely fine. That’s why I want to go home.’

  Marty stroked his chin, giving her his best perplexed expression. ‘What shall I tell them?’

  ‘Tell them your wife wants to go home and ravish her husband.’

  Marty’s face heated up to a perfect poppy red. ‘I’ll get my coat,’ he said.

  Carolyn smiled to herself as he left the room. She was a wicked liar, she thought, but at least she’d got her way for once.

  Chapter Three

  Buying a lottery ticket gave a strange new structure to Molly’s Saturday evening. She wasn’t used to having the television on, far preferring to curl up in luxurious silence with a book, so it was odd to have her little flat filled with so much noisy excitement. She’d put the programme on at the beginning and had soon become bored, realising the draw wasn’t until the end, so she tinkered around her flat with a pair of baby scissors and a toy watering can, tidying up her beloved plants.

  She got so carried away with her miniature jungle that she almost missed the draw completely, running over to the TV just in time to see the first ball rolling out of the bubblegum machine.

  Molly screamed as she looked down at her ticket. Number one. She had it! How was that for beginner’s luck? And what a perfect number for it to be: she’d been so worried about spending a whole one pound on one ticket and now the first ball was number one! She smiled, feeling very smug with herself, but believing it couldn’t possibly last as ball number two was revealed. Number sixteen. A quick glance down proved her wrong; she had it! Yes! This was so easy. Why hadn’t she done it before? she wondered.

  Ball number three, ten, made Molly scream again in delight. That was ten pounds. She’d made a profit of nine pounds, which meant that she’d be able to replace the pound in the petty cash box and go back to the supermarket and collect her fruit juice and wine.

  Ball number four: three. Molly gasped, unable to scream this time; she just sat staring at the television in stunned silence.

  Ball number five: eighteen. Molly’s dark eyes widened to twice their normal size and, as the sixth ball appeared, number two, her mouth dropped open in silent wonder.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

  SIX!

  The pink ticket fluttered in her hand like an autumn leaf about to take flight.

  NO!

  She blinked. She swallowed. Then the numbers disappeared from the screen. She’d made it up! She was overexcited. She’d never bought a lottery ticket before in her life and had obviously got carried away with the whole thing.

  As if sensing her excitement, the ticket dropped from her trembling fingers. Bending down quickly lest it slipped down the gaps between the floorboards, she picked it up. It just couldn’t be true. Not her! Not with her first ticket.

  Teletext! She’d check teletext. They’d have the numbers up, wouldn’t they?

  She fumbled for the remote control, which had bedded itself down the side of her sofa and, with hands which no longer seemed connected to her brain, she switched over. What page? What page? What was she looking for? She giggled. She felt drunk.

  Page 555. She waited and, after a few tension-ridden seconds, there they were again:

  one, two, three, ten, sixteen and eighteen.

  The same six numbers. Her eyes checked them over on her ticket. No, she hadn’t made it up; there was absolutely no mistake and they looked so beautifully simple. The easy flow of one, two and three. How unlikely it seemed for them to appear and yet – statistically – they were as likely as any other combination. The simple strength of number ten. How sturdy it looked – the first double numeral. Sweet sixteen had proved very sweet indeed. And eighteen – the age that made everything legal.

  Molly looked at them jostling together like happy friends. Was it unusual to have all six numbers under twenty? There they stood, like beautifully obedient soldiers waiting for her command, but she had absolutely no idea what to do.

  She walked round her little flat, feeling that, if her smile got any bigger, her face would crack open completely. And it wasn’t just her who was smiling; the whole world seemed to be smiling: the plates on her draining board, the apples in her fruit bowl, her coffee table, her bookshelves – everything suddenly looked happier. Even her pot plants were in on the act.

  ‘Congratulations, Molly!’ the spider plant waved from the window sill.

  ‘Don’t spend it all at once,’ the parlour palm warned from its corner by the bookcase.

  Molly laughed a wonderful glittery laugh that bounced and hopped around the room. She felt as if she’d swallowed a great bubble of happiness, and it all seemed so ridiculous because less than ten minutes ago she’d been Molly Bailey, florist with a mortgage, a loan and a seriously starved bank account. How could six numbers change all that? It wasn’t as if she’d even chosen them with any care. They weren’t birthdays or lucky numbers or anything. Her pen had merely chosen them at random – as if driven by a force of its own. There’d been no thought process as her pen made the vertical strokes, and yet they’d had the power to change everything. The only question was, how much had she won? How much were her six numbers actually worth? She couldn’t remember what they’d said on the programme, but there was the possibility of a number of winners, which would mean dividing the jackpot. But, even with that eventuality, it would probably be more money than she knew what to do with.

  Just imagine! Mrs Purdie had said. Molly gasped. She was imagining all right: imagining shopping trips where she wouldn’t be embarrassed at the till; imagining not falling into panic mode at every strange noise Old Faithful made, or worrying each year when the MOT was due, imagining…

  But her reason was trying to communicate with her: Earth to Molly! Earth to Molly!

  Molly’s heart raced. She knew there had to be a glitch. There was bound to be a spanner, or three, in the works.

  The Bailey men. Her mouth dropped open at the thought of them: Marty, Magnus and Granville – three names to strike terror into the heart of any new millionaire – and, all at once, her imagining drained away.

  Heaven only knew what they’d do once the
y found out about her win.

  Molly’s mouth had made a silent and perfect ‘o’ as she was told how much she’d won. Four point two million pounds. For her. And her alone.

  She’d been told by the winners’ adviser not to make any rash decisions; to take a holiday and give herself plenty of time to think things through. But she didn’t need time. She knew she couldn’t possibly keep all that money, especially with the men in her family. The trouble had been in deciding exactly what she was going to do with it.

  So, Molly had spent two long weeks mulling over her options whilst slowly coming to terms with the fact that she was a millionaire.

  A millionaire, for goodness’ sake! In the peace of the shop, it was still hard to take in and it didn’t really make any difference to her daily routine. Chrysanthemums didn’t care if you were a millionaire: they still wanted watering, which was just the way she wanted it. She wasn’t into exotic holidays, fancy cars or champagne, and her fingers, with their boyishly short nails, would look ridiculous if she were to dress them with large diamonds. Besides, that sort of ostentation had always been frowned upon in her family, and money had been the source of every single family argument. As far back as she could remember, her mother and father had fought over it. Holidays never got more luxurious than static caravans, and birthdays were kept to a bare minimum, usually involving reference books and sensible clothes.

  ‘Presents should be practical,’ her father used to say.

  Her mother had never agreed. ‘Books and clothes aren’t presents, they’re punishments!’

  Then the arguing would start, and it would always end the same way: with Cynthia giving in to Magnus. Well, that’s how it appeared on the surface. What Magnus didn’t see was Cynthia picking Molly and Marty up from school and driving them into town for hot chocolate and cake, followed by a trip to the toy shop to pick out a present, which would be bought on the understanding that their father was never to lay eyes on it. For years, Marty had had to keep his train set tucked under his bed, and Molly’s doll’s house was hidden at the back of her wardrobe.

  For Molly, even today, the filthiest word in the English language was money. Forget anything with four letters, the word money was really quite hateful to her. Ever since she was a child, she’d blamed money for bad behaviour in people. Her father had made their lives miserable at home with his penny-pinching ways. She and Marty had been the only children at school not to be given pocket money. Instead of freely handing out his cash, their father would ask them what they wanted. He would then ask whether it was absolutely necessary and, if they insisted that it was, which they rarely did through fear, he’d give them half of the money they actually needed and told them to find some odd jobs round the house in order to raise the rest.

  The only time they ever got any half-decent presents was at Christmas, and that was only because their mother’s family erred on the generous side.

  ‘They’re children, dear,’ Cynthia would chide when she thought Molly and Marty were out of earshot. ‘And you’re only a child once. What possible harm can a little bit of spoiling do to them?’

  But Magnus Bailey was never convinced by his wife’s sweet reasoning. ‘It wasn’t the way I was brought up,’ he’d growl back, and Molly and Marty, hiding behind the door, would draw their eyebrows together and wave their forefingers in the air in perfect impersonation of their father. They’d always managed to laugh at their father’s behaviour. Until the day their mother had walked out.

  Molly shook her head at the memory. If there was one lesson she’d learnt from the past, it was that money was to be enjoyed. Yes, bills had to be paid, and provisions made for the future, but her father’s way of saving and depriving had done nothing but create barriers, and she was determined that that was never going to happen again.

  Yes, she thought, if the Bailey men got wind of her win, they’d have plenty to say about it. They’d have it ISA’d and bonded, split over sure-fire shares and packaged off into a pension before you could say ‘shopping spree’. And that was just Molly’s share of it.

  She wouldn’t get to keep it all herself, of course. Not that she wanted to anyway. She’d give her family a share: a small share each. They didn’t need any more money, she was quite sure of that. They were all as comfortable as old armchairs, and Molly knew that her winnings would only lie useless in a bank, accumulating even more wealth to be fought over and never actually enjoyed.

  Anyway, what on earth could one person possibly want with so much money? It really was quite obscene. Sure, she’d had years of scraping by to make ends meet, and it would be lovely not to have to worry anymore, but four point two million pounds? She had more than she knew what to do with with the interest alone.

  So she’d come to a decision. After sorting out her own finances at The Bloom Room, and putting a little aside for each family member as a token of goodwill, she was going to get rid of it.

  As she rearranged the rainbow display of carnations, she realised how hard it was going to be leaving the shop, even for a short while. It had become such a huge part of her life that it was hard to imagine being anywhere else. But one just couldn’t be a millionaire in a place as small as Kirkby Milthwaite, and she wouldn’t be gone for long; just long enough, she thought, a smile lighting her rosy face; long enough to spread a little happiness.

  ‘I hear you’re going away?’ a voice startled Molly out of her reverie.

  She blinked as she saw Mrs Purdie standing in the centre of the shop. How could she know that, Molly wondered, and then she remembered that this was Kirkby Milthwaite and that news travelled faster than a summer swallow.

  ‘Is it true?’ Mrs Purdie asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Molly said, ‘but I won’t be away for long.’

  ‘It’s a bit sudden, isn’t it?’

  Molly nodded. ‘It is.’

  The old lady’s eyes crinkled at the edges. ‘A young man, is it?’ Mrs Purdie gazed at Molly and, for a moment, Molly thought that the old woman knew the truth. She knew! But how could she? Molly hadn’t told a soul. She was just getting paranoid. Maybe that’s what winning a large sum did to a person.

  ‘Not a young man, then?’ Mrs Purdie tried again, her eyes twinkling.

  Molly didn’t bother to say that it was because of a whole bunch of men that she was going away. The Bailey men: brother, Marty; father, Magnus; and, at the top of the hoarding hierarchy, Granville – ‘Old Bailey’ himself. Each one would swoop down on her millions, like starved vultures, if they got to hear about it, and she wasn’t about to let that happen. Molly was going on a spending spree but it was going to be like no other spending spree before. And, in the process, she was going to change the route of the Baileys once and for all.

  Chapter Four

  Tom Mackenzie stood outside the George Hotel, wincing as the rain finally found its way down his collar. He looked up at the pearly grey sky. So much for summer, he thought. This was one of the loveliest parts of the country – when the sun was shining. He loved the gently rolling fields with their mile-high hedgerows, and the villages with more ducks than people. He loved the quietness of the land: the way the flint churches seemed to grow out of the ebony soil. Yet it was this very quietness that he found so hateful in his job because, lovely as it all was, rolling fields and candy-coloured cottages didn’t exactly provide riveting copy. He’d long grown tired of the absurd annual tractor race, the endless debates over new bypasses, and local shop robberies. They just weren’t the kind of news stories to stir his blood and make his fingers race feverishly over his keyboard.

  In short, he was bored, and it was beginning to show in his work. Only last week the editor had shouted across the small open-plan office, ‘Mackenzie, you great arse! You’ve got Brenda Myhill married to her own brother here!’

  Tom hadn’t bothered to apologise. He’d rewritten his copy and gone home. But it couldn’t go on like this. He’d often asked himself why he was letting his life leak away when he knew there could be so much more. But
where? Where was this life he wanted to lead? One thing was for certain: it wasn’t hanging around outside hotels in the hope that a D-list celebrity might show his head and make a comment about his relationship with his much younger co-star in last year’s Christmas panto.

  So what was it that kept him going? That big story that would make his name? The splash that would propel him into the world of the big players? It wasn’t really likely to happen in a backwater of East Anglia. But you never could tell, and that’s what kept him sane: the promise of something bigger and better just over the horizon. In the meantime, he was freezing his butt off in the middle of a Suffolk summer.

  Sod it, he thought. He was going to do his shopping. Shaking a hand through his dark-blond hair, which had almost turned black in the persistent drizzle, he headed for his car.

  There weren’t many advantages to living in the middle of the country but farm shops were one of them. Tom loved the fact that the goods for sale were grown only a few yards away and wouldn’t have been flown across oceans with the possibility of foreign creepy-crawlies as travelling companions.

  As he drove along the country lanes, he felt himself begin to thaw out. It had crossed his mind that he could probably get away with spending his entire career in his car, just driving around the county, making the stories up in his head.

  ‘After a night of torrential rain, Mr Mandrake was shocked to find the river running through his sock drawer.’ Or ‘For centuries, this village has been the home of the annual duck and teaspoon race.’ Nobody would notice because they were exactly the kinds of things the local paper was full of each week.